Overview

Swarm Intelligence is a fundamental guiding principle of many natural systems. While it is most apparent in social insects such as ants, bees and termites, the underlying phenomenon of self-organization is scale-free, governing multi-body systems ranging from atoms to galaxies. This class will provide an overview over both computational swarm intelligence, classes of algorithms and meta-heuristics that are inspired by biological systems and can provide competitive solutions to a number of hard optimization problems, and embedded swarm intelligence, including swarm robotics and robotic materials.

The class consists of lectures every Tuesday to introduce this week’s topic and literature reviews presented by the students on Thursdays, a mini project and a final group project. The mini project consists of implementing a computational swarm intelligence algorithm of the student’s choice and presenting its results to class. The project will explore a novel direction, either by deriving a novel algorithm, combining existing ones, or identifying a novel application.

Prerequisites: Discrete Algorithms

Meetings

We will be meeting Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9.30 till 10.45 in MUEN E064.